In commerce today there are employed a wide variety of material handling trucks or truck trailers. These trucks are employed for diverse purposes such as refuse collection, delivery of building materials such as sand, carriage of food products such as grain, rice, and dry beans, and of particular interest herein, the transport of salt for deicing roadways and the carriage of mulch and woodchip material for distribution in landscaping applications. Many of these material handling trucks utilize a V-bed design which has relatively wide opening at the top through which material can be loaded into the trailer and a narrower bottom portion. In a V-bed trailer, one common material moving device is a drag link conveyor system which operates to pull the bottom layers of material resting in from the narrow lower portion of the V shaped bed from front to rear where the material exits the trailer. An alternative material moving device in V-bed trailers is an auger which rotates to push material to the rear. In other trailers, the material handling mechanism may be a hydraulic ram that pushes from front to back thereby emptying the material deposited in the trailer from the back portion, or a walking floor system in which slats at the bottom of the trailer are moved hydraulically to push the trailer contents towards the rear of the trailer.
A live floor or reciprocating slat system is particularly suitable in a trailer which is relatively rectangular as opposed to V shaped and is employed in mulch handling trailers as typified by apparatus similar to that in U.S. Pat. No. 8,616,365. Hydraulic ram systems are commonly deployed in refuse handling trucks where compressed garbage can be pushed from the trailer into a landfill or recycling facility by operation of the hydraulic ram. Drag link systems in V-bed trailers are commonly employed for handling salt and grains.
A truck with material handling trailer or truck bed is generally an expensive piece of machinery. A truck/trailer combination with a capacity of five yards or more of material will frequently cost from $75,000 up to over $200,000. With such a sizeable capital investment in a material handling vehicle, it is desirable to obtain as much use as possible from the capital investment.
Specifically, salt spreading trucks, commonly constructed with V-bed and draglink system to convey salt materials from the trailer to a spreader at the back of the trailer are used in the winter months while mulch blowing trucks are used in the course of the remainder of the year when there is no ice. Many landscape service providers and municipalities with responsibilities for roadways and park lands are desirous of providing both salt spreading and mulch blowing services. However, for two types of material handling trucks the associated usage is entirely seasonal and complimentary. In addition, both the most commonly used material moving devices and dispersal apparatus are different in the salt and mulch spreading vehicles. So, for moving salt, an auger or drag link system is commonly used, while the reciprocating slat is particularly suited for the much lighter weight mulch material. Mulch is also relatively easy to entrain in air flow and can be blown into place, while relatively dense salt is more commonly dispersed with a rotational spreader.
A mulch blowing truck provides significant advantage over the manual distribution of mulch. For instance, in a typical small residential application situation, the manual spreading of mulch over a 1,000 square foot area might require ten man hours of labor and ten square yards of mulch product. However, a mulch blower could provide better coverage and faster application so that the same 1,000 square feet might be covered with only five square yards of mulch product and only about 1.5 to 3.5 man hours of labor. In spite of these significant savings in labor and material cost, it is often difficult to justify the investment of funds in a dedicated mulch blowing truck considering that there is not only the initial capital expense of purchasing the truck, but also operating costs including vehicle insurance and maintenance for the full year that must be recovered in only part-year operation.
Economies could be realized if existing material handling trucks such as salt spreader trucks, which are only used when weather is unsuitable for applying mulch products, could also be utilized in other parts of the year for mulch spreading without incurring additional capital and maintenance costs that would be associated with an entirely new truck. Therefore, the present invention is directed to the reversible modification of material handling trucks to be adapted to handle and blow mulch.